Tuesday, April 2, 2013

From Latina poet to Latina Playwright: Cordova on Delgado

Back in 2010, we were pleased to announce Diana Marie Delgado as our third Letras Latinas Residency Fellow. More recently, we announced our sixth, Cristian Flores Garcia. It's a happy coincidence, given that Letras Latinas Blog would like to bring attention, when possible, to what's happening in the world of Latino/a theater, that Diana Marie Delgado, in recent years, has been devoting time to honing her playwrighting skills, in addition to her poetry (she's also a CantoMundo Fellow). What follows is piece penned by Texas-born, NYC-based writer Steven Cordova, on Delgado's recent theater exploits. ---FA

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Diana Marie Delgado
was the 2010 recipient of the Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship, and it would
seem she hasn’t put her pen down since. Her manuscript, Late-Night Talks
with Men I Think I Trust, was a finalist for the 2012 Andrés Montoya Poetry
Prize; her play, After the Fire, was finalist for the 2011 La MaMa ETC's
Ellen Stewart Emerging Playwright Award. And yet another play, Desire
Road, was given a staged reading at La MaMa Galleria in NYC in 2011 and can
be found in a recent issue of PALABRA Magazine. You might be getting the
idea by now that Delgado has been at serious play with the play, and she has.

Now, a play is a story and a story can often
become a play—except when it’s in the hands of a poet as imaginative as Diana
Marie Delgado. Or to put it another way, both the play and the story are forms
which progress in a linear fashion: first we get a bit of rising action, then a
climax and then, finally, a denouement. But in the case of After the Fire,
both forms are being given a more original treatment in which the action and
the climaxes are largely those of language and poetic turn, of enjambment and a
fresh perspective on an all too-familiar subject.

I say “are being given” because After the
Fire has had two staged readings in New York City in the last two years,
and Delgado, always poised and articulate during the Q&As that have
followed both performances, acknowledges that the play is still very much in
development. She and her creative partner, director Charlotte
Brathwaite, have reduced the number of characters,
for instance, from five to three. What thankfully hasn’t changed is the
playwright’s approach to her subject matter. More about subject matter in a
bit; right now I’d like to address Delgado’s approach.

While Delgado is certainly not the first poet
to venture onto the playwright’s stage, she is the first I know who is doing so
now, today, a post-MFA-in-writing-world in which writers often develop their
work in “workshops.” Given the often genre-specific nature of such enterprises,
Delgado’s workshop partners have probably suggested (or, if not, they’ll soon
suggest) that she tell a story with a more traditional beginning, middle and
end. Or that she give us more quotidian information about the play’s
characters.

Delgado has nonetheless stuck to her literary
guns, giving us, for example, this kind of character manifest:

ANGELA: Sand at
the bottom of the ocean.

THE OLD WOMAN:
Arthur’s dead mother.

ARTHUR: a kite
brought down by a gale.

And I think one of Delgado’s reasons for being
so admirably steadfast is After the Fire’s subject matter, which
centers—centrifuges—around a dysfunctional family and the always-risky
territory of sexual abuse.

Subject matter of this nature is, after all,
completely reliant upon something we can never completely rely upon, memory.
The kind of memories that After the Fire takes on comes back to us with
no clear beginning, no clear middle and no definitive end. They come back to
us, instead, over time, offering new bits of information and new
revelations. And they fracture our sense of time, these memories, they disjoint
our sense of what happened first and then what happened after that. It sounds
like a dream, doesn’t it, all this uncertainty, all this constant shifting
around in time and place, in perspective; and, indeed, Delgado’s working
subtitle for After the Fire is Un Sueño, a
dream. Delgado, through the character of Arthur sums the phenomenon up
this way, “Childhood’s fuck’n trippy. No matter how many people you tell,
it’s the one place only you can visit.”

Delgado says she tends to write a lot, to “overwrite, then go
back and select for inclusion in the play only those passages which strike her
as most strange (dream-like?), the ones, in particular, she herself doesn’t
understand. But fear not, you will find a great deal of understanding in After
the Fire: understanding of other people, of their complex motives and their
dreams. And you’ll get a story, too, just not one that comes at you the way
most stories do. Or at least I have left both staged readings feeling relieved
that I hadn’t once again been presented with another case of
the-good-guys-versus-the-bad or, worse, a night full of easy moral judgments.
Instead, I left happy in the knowledge that there is a writer—a heroine—at the
center of lasllamas, and that I very much look forward to seeing
how that heroine stokes this, her own entrancing fire.

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Steven Cordova is the 2012 first-place
winner of the International Reginald Sheperd Memorial Poetry Prize. His first
full-length collection of poems, Long
Distance, was published by Bilingual Review Press in 2010. He has a short
story in Ambientes: New Queer Latino
Writing (University of Wisconsin Press) and an essay in The Other Latino: Writing Against a Singular
Identity (University of Arizona Press). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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LETRAS LATINAS

Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), strives to enhance the visibility, appreciation and study of Latinx literature both on and off the campus of the University of Notre Dame—with an emphasis on programs that support newer voices, and foster a sense of community among writers.

Letras Latinas is under the direction of ILS faculty fellow Francisco Aragón.